This past Sunday we had an opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing in Kansas City and took the advice of a friend to visit the National World War I Museum. It is an impressive building and has recently had some rennovations. Who knew it was in Kansas City? Evidently, there was not enough taught about WWI in high school history class, as we spent about 3 hours trying to absorb the info from just the first half of the war. We’ll have to go back to learn more about what happened after the U.S. joined in. Funny how there sometimes seems to be a collision of unrelated events that seem uncanny. We had just the week before heard on the news about the last World War I veteran, Florence Green had passed away. She was 110 years old. There was a wreath at the museum in her honor.
In another unrelated event, just today, I went to our local public library to request a library card…a task I have been wanting to do since we moved last year. Our lovely little library is quite new and the walls are decorated with famous quotes from well-known literary sources. One of them, the first two lines of a poem by Sara Teasdale written in 1920, struck me like a bolt. Here is the whole poem:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Posted by fencepost 
